38
THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 9, 2015
here in Shanghai, and he climbed up
to the fourth floor and jumped out a
window."
The room grew quiet. This was the
kind of detail that I couldn't help but
notice in China---the old man method-
ically making his way to the higher floor
to make sure that this time he did it
right. Zhang continued, "He was a math
teacher. I was ten years old when this
happened. I was very close to him."
The two other editors were friends
of Zhang, but they didn't say anything,
and nobody asked a question. In China,
such a silence could mean that he had
often talked about the suicide, or it could
mean that this was the first time he had
ever mentioned it. Finally, the conver-
sation moved on to something else, and
the room seemed to warm up. I kept
signing books.
At Shanghai Translation, each man-
uscript passes through three lev-
els of political review: the editor, his su-
pervisor, and the head of the company.
Occasionally, the higher levels make a
change, but the vast majority of censor-
ship is handled by editors like Zhang.
In 2013, when the Times ran an article
about foreign authors publishing in
China, it noted that "publishing houses
are required to employ in-house cen-
sors, most of them faithful party mem-
bers." But this isn't accurate. At Shang-
hai Translation, there's no employee
whose primary job is to monitor polit-
ical content. Such a distinction may
seem academic, but it matters greatly in
a country with many types of political
control. In China, newspapers and mag-
azines are censored much more heavily
than books, and state-run papers like
China Daily actively promote the Party
line. On the Internet, censors excise all
references to certain taboo topics. But
for an editor like Zhang, who is not a
Party member, there is no ideology and
no absolute list of banned subjects. His
censorship is defensive: rather than pro-
moting an agenda or covering up some
specific truth, he tries to avoid catching
the eye of a higher authority. In fact, his
goal---to have a book translated and
published as accurately as possible---
may run counter to the goals of the Party.
The result is a strangely unenthusi-
astic form of censorship. In one section
of "Country Driving," I describe in de-
tail the Party's manipulation of a village
election, but none of this material was
removed or changed. Probably the most
negative thing that I have ever written
about China is the final section of that
book, which describes a small industrial
city called Lishui. In the factory town,
I observed bosses hiring underage work-
ers, violating safety laws, damaging the
environment, and encountering o cial
corruption; in one scene, I describe wit-
nessing government tax o cials shake
down two entrepreneurs for a bribe. All
of that was left intact in the mainland
version. Of the section's hundred and
forty-five pages, only nine words were
removed, a background reference to op-
position to the Party. The rest of the
book was cut in three places: two refer-
ences to Falun Gong and a long scene
in which a drunk Mongolian tour guide
tells me that Genghis Khan, like Hit-
ler and Osama bin Laden, was a great
man, and that the Chinese have no right
to claim him for their history.
The censorship of "River Town"
seems even more capricious.The attack
by the mob, a discussion of the flawed
Three Gorges Dam, scenes that show
the ignorance of college Party o cials---
none of that was altered or removed.
The longest cut in the book consists of
a conversation between me and one of
my Chinese tutors, in which we men-
tion Li Peng, the former Premier, who
was orphaned as a child. In the scene, I
o end my tutor by mistakenly using the
word "bastard" instead of "orphan."
Zhang told me that he had wanted
to leave the scene alone, but it was too
risky for the name Li Peng to be con-
nected to "bastard," even if the point
was to show a foreigner's clumsiness
with Chinese. This is one trend of the
censorship: criticism of local o cials
and Party activities is fine, but certain
high-profile national figures are o lim-
its. References to Falun Gong are al-
most always removed. The Tiananmen
Square massacre is usually called "an in-
cident" or "a revolt." Material about Tibet
or Xinjiang tends to get cut. Zhang ex-
plained that he hadn't censored the de-
scription of the Mongolian tour guide,
but the head of the publishing company
removed it as a precaution. "Country
Driving" was the publisher's first for-
eign book about China, and it didn't
want somebody in the government to
read the words of the drunk Mongo-
lian and think about Tibet.
Zhang said that he had been partic-
ularly anxious while preparing that first
book---he compared it to walking a tight-
rope. But, after the book appeared, it es-
tablished a baseline. "Thanks to the ini-
tial success, now I am more confident
and skillful in dealing with the sensitive
A SHIP'S WHISTLE
Years passed and I received no letter with the word "trombone."
The distant cousins wrote, o ered their shriller sympathies.
"What's wrong with us?" Nothing I knew. Plugboard and isinglass,
grimoire and cwm, friends all. Still I felt horribly alone.
Until one day it dropped through roundel light onto the mat.
I was tearing my dictionaries of hope who, why, and what
apart when it sounded, that note pressing for home. Trombone.
And fearing it a dream was like waking in the wrong room,
not daring to believe in your return, or having come
to my senses after sickness. Veneer, mirror, and comb:
objects that shivered as relief swelled under them, they drew
lots to be turned to words which, soon as said, I knew
were brass. Years sliding past alone until avast! trombone.
---Will Eaves